326 NATURAL HISTORY 
at nignt, though the air was perfectly still, Dol- 
lond’s glass went down to one degree below zero } 
This strange severity of the weather made me very 
desirous to know what degree of cold there might 
be in such an exalted and near situation as New-; 
ton. We had, therefore, on the morning of the! 
10th, written to Mr. , and entreated him to 
hang out his thermometer made by Adams, and to 
pay some attention to it morning and evening, ex- 
pecting wonderful phenomena in so elevated a re- 
gion, at two hundred feet or more above my house. 
But, behold! on the 10th, at eleven at night, it was 
down only to 17°, and the next morning at 22°, 
when mine was at 10°!. We were so disturbed at 
this unexpected reverse of comparative local cold, 
that we sent one of my glasses up, thinking that of 
Mr. must, somehow, be wrongly constructed. 
But, when the instruments came to be confronted, 
they went exactly together, so that, for one night 
at least, the cold at Newton was 18 degrees less 
than at Selborne, and through the whole frost 10 or 
12 degrees; and, indeed, when we came to ob- 
serve consequences, we could readily credit this, 
for all my laurustines, bays, ilexes, arbutuses, cy- 
presses, and even my Portugal laurels,* and, which 
occasions more regret, my fine sloping laurei 
hedge, were scorched up, while at Newton the 
same trees have not lost a leaf! 
We had steady frost on the 25th, when the ther| 
* Mr. Miller, in his Gardener’s Dictionary, says positively 
that the Portugal laurels remained untouched in the remarkable 
frost of 1739-40. So that either that accurate obs: rve _was 
much mistaken, or else the frost of December, 1784, was muc 
more severe and destructive than that in the year above I en 
tioned. Ls 
eee, 
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